5 Apps Let You Dedicate Songs for Valentine’s Day

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, which means that emotions will be flying high. Restaurants will be packed with couples vowing their undying love. Children will be hopped up on chocolate and chalky candy hearts. Some people will turn to friends (or liquor) for emotional support as they lament their singlehood. Others will turn to friends (or liquor) to celebrate being single. And then there are those who will prattle on all day long about how this “Hallmark holiday” is nothing but a consumerist ploy by greeting card companies to make you spend money.

While we may have diverging opinions about February 14th, we probably all have people in our lives who we think are pretty special even if we don’t always remember to tell them. Well, there’s no time like the present, regardless of the date, to start telling the important people in our life how we feel about them — and of course there’s no better way to tell them than with music.

If only there was app that could… Oh, wait! There are several.

Inspired by radio song dedications of the olden days, the following apps let you “dedicate” a song or video to someone by adding a personal note and sharing it with them either publicly (via Facebook or Twitter) or privately (via email or text message). Whether you want to dedicate a song to a romantic interest, a good friend, or a family member, each of these apps can help you out. While they’re all fairly similar, each has its own style of personalization.

To send a dedication with Songnote, simply choose a song within the app from YouTube, Rdio, Soundcloud, Spotify or your own music library, add a personal message, and hit Send. You’ll be able to choose whether to share via Facebook, Twitter, email, or text message.

Songnote may not have many frills, but it looks nice, and we love that you can choose a song from so many sources. Also, this is a simple task — why not go the simple route?

Song dedications weren’t always reserved for the radio waves. If you were lucky, you could get MTV to announce your song dedication for the whole country to hear. Now, MTV is back in the business of sending musical messages with MTV Dedicate.

To get started, choose a music video. Next, you’ll have to log into either your Facebook or Twitter account to access your friends lists, or choose a friend from your contacts list. Add a personal message, and send.

This app does not support mobile playback yet, which means that your beloved will only be able to view your dedication on a regular computer.

Song sharing with ShoutOut Radio happens through Facebook, so you’ll have to sign in with that. Then, either select a song from your phone’s music library or search for another song.

We’re not exactly sure what database the app is searching. Occasionally in our testing, we selected a song from our library and when it came time to send the dedication, we noticed that a karaoke version or an instrumental version of the song was being sent in place of the original. We also noted that many karaoke and instrumental versions of songs come up in search results.

If you get the song you were after, the next step is to add a personal message. Finally, choose who you want to send it to from your list of Facebook friends, and then select whether you want your shout out to be a public or private message.

To use Songdedicate, you’ll need to create an account first. Once you’ve done that, select a song from iTunes (they’ll get a preview) or from your iOS music library, and add a personal message. You can also choose a photo to send along with your song, which is a nice little addition.

Once you’re satisfied, send your dedication via text message, email, or “Direct Dedication” to other users of the app.

Unlike the others, Songed is a web app that does pretty much what the others do: choose a song, add a personal message and a photo, and send either through email or Facebook. We ran into the same song selection problem we did with ShoutOut Radio (i.e. karaoke and instrumental versions of songs), but if that’s not a deal breaker for you and you prefer a web app, Songed will do.